New June 2025: hint for presentations prepared with a MAC (bottom of the page)
New June 2025: look into your pptx that are in fact zip files!
Slides are no hand-outs: neither the slides nor the presenter should be superfluous
Know your public
know your location (screen size, what part of the screen is not visible from the back? where will the audience be?)
tell a story !
a story goes as follows: Once upon a time, there was a problem. A really huge problem! So huge, that nobody else than myself had the courage to work on it. I had to dig deep into the literature. Derive solutions to complex equations. And then: I discovered that I was all wrong! What a disaster! Luckily, I met my great and incredible PhD fellow at the coffee machine. She provided me all this new data and together, we had this incredible idea to solve the big PROBLEM. Since then, everyone has lived happily. But of course, there will be new adventures.
you don't see the link to your own presentation?
present the research gap (the problem, a conflict), say why you are the right person with the right methods to address it
avoid completely linear stories (boring!), say what / who inspired you
say how you solved the research gap
For a very good to excellent talk: never look your computer screen nor your projection;
Design your slides such as to not use the pointer: pointers are awful if you are stressed (we see you trembling) and in modern hybrid settings, you never know in advance how the pointer works
you want to point something out? add an arrow or similar on your slide!
Know your story but do not learn it by heart;
my method to know what comes next without even looking at my slides or screen: take a white paper, draw e.g. 16 boxes that correspond to your 16 slides
put on each slide a key word or a drawing (better) that summarizes for you the main content / message of this slide
make sure you know the order and content of your boxes by heart
a google slide with essentials about presenting figures in slides
If you prepare your slides on OS (Mac) with Powerpoint or similar, do not embed the figures in pdf format. Pdf previews are native in OS, but no Windows-PC can display embedded pdfs (even if you export our pptx file as pdf, you will not be able to display the embedded figures on a PC).
Always embed figures as png or similar if there is any risk that you need to re-use your file on a Windows - PC.
Follow these instructions (generated with chatgpt) to look deeper into your pptx file, e.g. to understand which embedded media makes the pptx size explode:
Make a copy of the original file.
Change the file extension from .pptx to .zip.
Unzip the file using any unzip tool.
You'll now see folders like: ppt/ – contains slides, media, layouts, etc.; _rels/ – relationships; Content_Types].xml – MIME type info; docProps/ – metadata like author, title.
If You Modify the Contents:
If you edit XML files, ensure they remain valid XML (unclosed tags, wrong namespaces, etc. will corrupt the file).
Do not remove required files or folders;
you can replace eg. image9.png by a lower resolution image9.png; you can also replace e.g. image9.png by an image file that is saved under another format (to increase compression), but you still have to give it the original extension (i.e. save as jpg but still call it .png)
Select the contents inside the unzipped folder (not the folder itself).
Create a ZIP archive (must not have a top-level folder).
Important: The root of the .zip must contain [Content_Types].xml, not be nested inside another folder.
Rename the .zip back to .pptx.